July, 2011
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As Cheap is Becoming Free, How Do We Get Clients to Pay?
Today the majority of media that changes hands online is free and unauthorized. In other words, pirated. How do we “compete with piracy” in today’s world of digital content? In this intriguing piece from the Guardian, Cory Doctorow breaks down the most common strategies that content providers are leveraging in the Cloud Age to get [...]
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The Dark Side of Personal Mobile Devices in the Workplace
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the threat that unmanaged “rogue” mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, present to the overall IT security picture of a business. Here’s basically what’s happening: people are using their own devices for work purposes. IT (whether a provider like us or an internal IT department) doesn’t even [...]
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Could iPad Change the Future of Gaming?
John Riccitiello, the CEO of Electronic Arts (which makes pretty awesome video games), was recently quoted at a conference saying Consoles [like XBox 360] used to be 80% of the industry as recently as 2000. Consoles today are 40% of the game industry, so what do we really have? He also said that iPad is [...]
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Register Today for Our August Webcasts!
We’re thrilled to announce great new webcasts to help your business grow. Don’t miss these great sessions. Register Today for: Welcome to the Future of IT Service: Four Tough Questions Answered The world of IT Services is changing, and fast. It can be tough to tell what’s real and what’s just hype. The good news [...]
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How Focusing On the Customer Is Actually Better For You
I’ve read a lot about sales, customer service, and relationship management, but personally happen to like the Question Based Selling series, which is the general inspiration for what I’m about to share with you: Being customer-focused really means just one thing: putting aside the natural tendencies to be self-centered (that plague all of us) and [...]
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Thoughts on Closing a Deal
We all wish we could close more sales. There have been at least a million pages spoken and written on the “art” and/or “science” of sales, and more specifically on closing a deal. I was really just looking for an excuse to use this image. But it’s really not so complicated after all. Given that [...]
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Harry Potter and the Creeping Disappointment
I am a big Harry Potter fan. I’ll admit it. Judge away, people, but I think it’s fantastic. Fan that I am, last weekend I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. I was really excited for the film. I won’t bore you with my review, but it was good. After [...]
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3 Easy Ways to Lose a Good Client
1) Become invisible Allow a customer to forget about all the hard work and value you provide to them for your monthly fees, and they will stop paying you and find another provider. This axiom has held true since the before the days of the Managed Services business model. When you are doing your proactive, [...]
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iPad Continues to Dominate Android Tablets in Enterprise
AllThingsD reported today that Good Technology, which supports mobile devices for enterprise clients including much of the Fortune 500, found that 27% of the mobile devices activated by its clients Q2 2011 were tablets. And 95% of those tablets were iPads. Pretty significant – tablets are being deployed by major enterprises. And almost all the [...]
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Cloud Nation: A New Interactive Community from SMB Nation
Last week at WPC, Harry Brelsford and the SMB Nation team announced their latest venture: Cloud Nation. Cloud Nation will build on the existing SMB Nation brand, and it includes an interactive community portal, media content, events, education, and a marketplace, which will all serve to expand the VAR’s ability to offer highly valuable, in-demand [...]
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Apple OS X Lion: Bridging the Gap Between Desktop and Mobile Experience
OS X Lion is available today for download on the Mac App Store. Boasting 250 new features, this latest release is already getting solid reviews for stability, features and, most importantly, user experience. MG Siegler reviews the product this morning on TechCrunch, and comments that, with its focus on multi-touch/gesture interaction on the trackpad and [...]
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People Don’t Buy What You Do…They Buy Why You Do It
I encountered this idea watching a TED video of Simon Sinek discussing how great leaders inspire action. TED is actually a pretty awesome organization. TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has [...]
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Communicating Better: Concrete and Abstract
There are two kinds of words: concrete and abstract. You use a combination of both to communicate. The abstract category covers most everything – every word that is open to interpretation in any way. Even “abstract” itself is an abstract word. The concrete is limited to, basically, those things which are exactly the same no [...]
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Sticks and Bananas: The Quest for Insight
I have a strange love for old books. The yellowed, torn and dog-eared pages, worn bindings, and pleasantly musty odors all remind me of the people I never met who’d received its information before I got my hands on it to do the same. It’s a shared experience in a sense, either the experience of [...]
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Behind the Rumors That Microsoft May Dump the Windows Brand: It’s All About the Ecosystem
Andy Lees, President of the Windows Phone division of Microsoft, said, as reported Friday on Business Insider, that the company aims for a “single ecosystem” for PCs, phones, tablets, and television. We’ve been saying for months that the “cloud” player who comes out on top will do so with an ecosystem that enables users to [...]
